Of course, Meiga goal is not to replace Samba. Samba is a mature file sharing technology for Local Area Networks, but it’s a little bit inconvenient for sharing files to the Internet.

I’m sure you’ve experienced problems with Samba more than one time, specially *that* time when you want to share some pictures to a friend with a laptop in the same room as you. Wouldn’t be convenient just to have a small web server and tell him/her “hey, just go to http://192.168.1.1:8001/pictures“? That’s what Meiga does (by the moment).

In addition, you can do the same but sharing to the Internet if you have an UPnP capable router. You don’t need to bother about port redirections, configurations or computer not finding themselves in the network. Just share, copy the address (with the copy icon) and paste it on a chat or IM. That’s all.

Meiga is lightweight, easy to use, network friendly and also application friendly. It's written in a mix of Vala and pure C code, using existing Gnome technologies to perform its tasks: libsoup is used as a simpler alternative to fat web servers, libgupnp is in charge of doing port redirections if the network router supports UPnP, and DBUS exposes a public API to allow the GUI and third party applications to control what is served. Some advanced publishing features are already implemented, like the feed server that can render an RSS view of a given directory.